Wednesday, November 16, 2005

What Recedes in the Distance

It's strange everytime I hear of someone's death. It's like a part of me dies, whether or not I was emotionally close to the person. Apart from the grief of a life ended, the sadness that someone no longer exists, there is something else. Something more selfish, more immediate. A fear that nuzzles close to my skin.

There goes someone else who knew me as a child. Someone who was always in my life, even if sometimes on the periphery. Each death is another death of my receding childhood and youth. In some time everyone who saw me when I was born-- who remembers me when I couldn't walk, who saw me before I became the person I am today--soon they will all be dead.

And then I will truly be old. The cycle is in perpetual motion. Death

"I do not stir.
The frost makes a flower,
The dew makes a star,
The dead bell,
The dead bell.

Somebody's done for"
(Sylvia Plath)

2 comments:

X said...

When death becomes us, is it end of the road?
The soul lives forever, my precious, my immortal.....

~ sorrow x ~

temporal said...

Harish commented on half a confession that my stories ( all three of them;) ) are set in hospitals and deal primarily with death…maybe…but the stories like the poems descend … from somewhere…am only a conduit…

….but i can confess this…other folks’ death perturb me more than my own…have this cavalier attitude about my own….jub aana hoga aaeegi…also in a strange way i tell myself that i will die only once….so big deal!

…have stayed up nights and days worrying over friends’ impending death…and have taken it more personally than their immediate relatives…